Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/106

 IV. PROGRESS IN ANATOMY AND MEDICINE IT IS by an easy transition that we turn from biology to medicine, from pure science inspired by the sheer desire to know and account for living organisms, to the healing art, which may be also scientific, though led by practical beneficent intent. The transition is the easier because we are in the later fourth and the third centuries before Christ, the most brilliant scientific age of Greece, though Aristotle lived no longer. Medicine in the Alexandrian school, led by Herophilus and Erasistratus, was supported by the now veritable sciences of anatomy and physiology. And of their works only scattered fragments have survived! Admirable as these men were, we must remember that we are not engaged upon a history of Greek medicine or biology, but are thinking of the value to the moderns of what the Greeks accomplished. Therefore we must occupy ourselves chiefly with those [84]